Public private partnership - a policy issue in transport telematics applications Technical working document

Despite a great variety of transport policies the 'public services' concept is the dominant organizational solution for the transport sector in the European countries. Public activity includes among others the provision of: infrastructure (roads, bridges, airports, tunnels, harbours...), traffic information, public transport (person and goods traffic), traffic police and emergency, taxes, fees and road pricing systems. As such the tasks partly belong to the 'productive' (not jurisdictional or administrational) functions of the public authorities. For them a trend to organizational changes can be observed throughout Europe resulting in deregulation, shift of competencies from state to regional or local authorities and privatization of former public services. These tendencies can be observed on different levels, for all transport modes and in countries with different organizational backgrounds (e.g. Great Britain, the Scandinavian countries, France, Germany). Driving forces are increasing financial pressures to public authorities in the provision of transport services, a growing demand of co-operation between local, regional, national authorities and a political change to deregulation and market solutions. Examples are the deregulation of state owned railway operators with concepts for regionalization, privatization and transnational harmonization, as well as the approaches within the field of air traffic control and management or the privatization of transport infrastructure (e.g. the Channel-Tunnel between France and Great Britain, Transrapid in Germany). Thus the transport sector experiences a complete re-definition of the responsibilities, i.e. the borderlines between: public authorities on different territorial levels and public and private tasks. (orig.)SIGLEAvailable from TIB Hannover: F00B495 / FIZ - Fachinformationszzentrum Karlsruhe / TIB - Technische InformationsbibliothekDEGerman